Solo Mother

Magic….

by christina on July 29th, 2008

I write often about magic in the everyday… about knowing where the milkweed pods are, or finding the perfect pebble. There is peace in small things, and beauty in the mundane. We are a culture of consumption, endlessly devouring everything in our path and still wanting more. We over-schedule our kids and work through the weekends.

When is the last time you were absolutely swept away by something?

My mother got tickets to see The Lion King. She and the King of Everything were slated to go this evening, but another family member needed her, and so she went, without once grumbling or complaining that she’d miss this event. Instead, she gave me her VIP tickets and told us to have a good time.

This morning, I walked to work with my son’s blue blazer draped on a hanger over his outfit for the evening; two men at the coffee shop whispered and cast speculative, warm glances on the diminutive elegance. “I’m taking my five year old son to the Kennedy Center this evening,” I smiled. They approved.

I can’t remember a night like tonight, not since my mother took me to see The Wiz when I was only a few years older than my son is now.

He insisted on dressing up, and so he donned his khaki trousers, his white, button-down shirt, his blue blazer, new shoes, and the elegant tie my father gave him from his own stock and my mother cut down for him. We went on the subway and then the shuttle bus, and everywhere we went, a ripple of approval, of nostalgia, of admiration moved in our path. You just don’t see little boys dressed up nowadays. Mothers watched us walk through the hall filled with flags at the Kennedy Center and they pointed him out to their husbands. It was… weird. I’d no sooner go to a grand hall, an opera, a musical, a symphony in anything less than dress up than I’d fly to the Moon.

I treated us both to dinner in the fancy restaurant on the terrace level, and we sat next to a wonderful older couple who were paying as much attention to the conversation at our table as they were to their own. I heard the lady whisper to her husband, “I’m going to offer to take their picture…” and after we’d finished our dinner, she did. The Kid was the perfect dinner companion, and his table manners were impressive for a five year old. We switched desserts, because mine was seriously. impressive. and then we went to collect our gift bag and see the show.

Magic. The gift of a perfect dinner in a formal dining setting with a capricious five year old was pretty magical, in and of itself… but the curtain came up and tears welled in my eyes.

Magic. Time and again, I found myself shouting for the sheer joy of what those performers and artists have wrought on stage.

Sheer and utter magic. I am beside myself with the power of humanity to create such things. There’s hope for us, yet.No matter how difficult the road, not matter how different my life has turned out from the way I’d taken for granted it would be, there is hope, and wonder, and the ability to be transported, no matter how heavy the burden. So I’m a single mother. So what. Some day, somehow, I will make someone’s heart soar, and I will make him or her laugh with amazement, through something I have created.

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